A browser is essential tool software for a user to surf the internet daily, and the user may conveniently view various information on the internet by using the browser. The browser interacts with a web page server mainly through the HTTP protocol and obtains web pages, these web pages are specified by URLs, and the most basic file format is usually the HTML and indicated by the MIME in the HTTP protocol. Multiple documents may be comprised in a web page, and each document is obtained from a server respectively. An early web page only contains simple content such as text and static image, etc. whereas a current web page has already become a comprehensive carrier for multiple elements such as text, image, animation, audio/video, etc. The richness of web page content brings about various fresh experiences to a user, and at the same time raises a higher requirement for an apparatus and a network. For example, for multimedia content such as image, audio/video, etc., the data size of such content is significantly larger than that of a text, and in the process of loading a web page, if the bandwidth of a network or the response speed of a server cannot meet the requirements, it will cause the speed of web page loading to be low and severely affect the internet surfing experience of a user.
With respect to the above problems, many existing browsers employ a web page caching technology. For example, the browser Internet Explorer will adopt a cumulative acceleration approach to store web page content (including pictures and cookie files, etc.) a user once accessed in a cache directory of a local computer of the user. Thereafter, each time the user browses a web page, IE will first search this directory, and if there is already accessed content in it, it is unnecessary for IE to obtain the content from a website server, instead, it is retrieved directly from a cache, thereby avoiding occupying a plenty of time and network resources due to re-downloading for each time and improving the speed of web page loading.
However, a problem with the prior art caching technology is that when the web page content is already updated on the server, and yet the browser still reads it directly from a local cache, this will cause that the updated content cannot be displayed timely. Although the user may command the browser to go to the server to obtain newer web page content by an action of “refreshing the page”, in the whole process of refreshing the page, the problem that the speed of loading is low will still exist.